Consumers are increasingly using automated mechanisms to perform every day transactions. Kiosks exist to avoid enterprise personnel and lines. These automated kiosks allow consumers to perform transactions with an enterprise or agency with little to no human intervention.
The general availability of retail self-checkout systems has naturally led to taking any and all measures practical to increase utilization of these cost effective systems, and maximize the throughput at these systems.
One issue with deployment of self-service checkout stations is that generally the hardware and the software support one mode of operation, which is a workflow and interface directed to customer-based checkouts. Similarly, cashier-assisted checkout stations include rigid hardware and software configurations. The result is that a lot of hardware duplication exists in retail establishments and many times the hardware is underutilized.
Self-Check Out (SCO) applications today are built by leveraging the underlying business rules contained in a Point-Of Sale (POS) interfaced to a separate SCO wrapper application, which provides the SCO experience while hiding nuances of the underlying POS. While this approach benefits from reuse of the complex POS business rules for pricing, taxing and the like, it suffers from the need to keep two distinct workflows synchronized; one from the SCO activity and the second from the POS application.
This traditional approach also complicates solution development and testing of each of the SCO application and the POS application, which use different device interface layers, different User Interface (UI) engines and rely on an interface definition between the POS and the SCO wrapper.
This interface may be direct and intended by the POS or it may be unintended where the SCO wrapper emulates devices and screen interactions of the POS to accomplish the SCO activities.